Husband missing from wife, after winning lotto

Mon, Nov. 19, 2007
Wife's at a loss to find husband after he wins the lottery
BY EVAN S. BENN
The clues trickled in that Donna Campbell's husband was hiding something from her.
Arnim Ramdass started to keep the television off at all times, then he disconnected their phone line. But the ah-ha! moment came when Campbell thumbed through the mail at their Miramar house and saw a postcard: Congratulations on the purchase of your new home.

Campbell, knowing her husband was a habitual lottery player, fired up her computer and Googled ``Ramdass and lotto.''

The first hit was a Florida Lottery press release about a pool of 17 airline mechanics who won a $19 million jackpot this summer.

''Here's a guy who for years has spent marital money on the lottery and at casinos, and he's always lost,'' said Bruce Baldwin, Campbell's attorney. ``And now he finally wins, and he's trying to keep it from his wife. That's pretty low.''

Campbell is suing her husband for her share of the jackpot.

Campbell, 47, is a former skin-cream model and runner-up at the 1979 Miss Trinidad and Tobago beauty pageant.

She and Ramdass, 51, an American Airlines mechanic at Miami International Airport, married in 2005, about five years after their romance began.

For as long as she's known him, Campbell said Ramdass and his co-workers pooled their money every Wednesday and Friday for the twice-weekly Lotto drawings. On June 20, they collected $220 and sent one of the workers to a Pinecrest Kwik Stop to buy tickets.

They let the computer pick the numbers, as always. One of the tickets matched all six numbers -- 6, 31, 34, 44, 45, 49 -- and the group of blue-collar airport workers suddenly saw a lot of green.

''I can go to work with a smile on my face,'' Arnim Richardson, another one of the winners, told a television news crew two days after the drawing. They caught up with Richardson at the Kwik Stop -- he had returned to buy more tickets.

But in the Campbell-Ramdass home, there were no smiles, only silence. Ramdass didn't say a word to his wife about his good fortune.

''He kept the televisions off and disconnected the phone line,'' Campbell said. ``He didn't want anyone calling and talking about the lottery.''

After the postcard showed up in the mail, Campbell confronted Ramdass.

'I said, `Do you have any news you want to share with me?' '' Campbell recalled. 'He said, `No. What are you talking about?' I said, 'The lottery.' ''

Cornered, Ramdass explained that he bought the ticket for his daughter Janelle, from another marriage, who lives in Orlando. But that story didn't fly with Campbell.

''He had been buying those tickets for years, and he never, ever said one of them was for her,'' Campbell said.

The group of mechanics opted for the lump-sum payment of $10.2 million, meaning each of the 17 winners would receive about $600,000 before taxes.

But Ramdass is nowhere to be found. His co-workers say he has taken a leave of absence from work (an American Airlines spokesman would not confirm, citing employee privacy). He has not shown up at the couple's middle-class home in Miramar's Silver Lakes neighborhood. Process servers have not been able to track down Ramdass to hand him the lawsuit papers, according to Campbell's attorney.

Attempts to reach Ramdass' 24-year-old daughter in Orlando were unsuccessful despite messages left at her home and on her cellphone. Other members of the winning group of mechanics did not return messages for comment.

The saga is similar to a fight another South Florida couple is still having over a 1995 Lotto jackpot.

In that case, Bernice Heslop of Pembroke Pines won $28 million but kept it a secret from her estranged husband. She quickly filed for divorce and cashed in her winning ticket the day after their split was finalized.

But Heslop's ex-husband, Ernest Moore Jr., eventually found out about her scheme -- from a man who overheard the story in a bar. Moore sued Heslop for a cut of the money, which he agreed to share with the bar patron, Marvel Rodriguez. Rodriguez recently filed a lawsuit against Moore, claiming he hasn't been paying as much as he was promised. Baldwin, of the Mase and Lara law firm, is representing Rodriguez in that case.

The attorney picked up a new client after Campbell read about that lottery fight in The Miami Herald.

Campbell said she needs her husband's lottery winnings to help pay bills and support herself.

''Right now, all I want is justice,'' she said. ``With time, I will file for divorce.''

http://www.miamiherald.com/467/story/313117.html